Franz Mehring on Nietzsche vs. Socialism

Absent
from Nietzsche's thinking was an explicit philosophical confrontation with socialism.
To be sure that was a big mistake for a philosopher at the end of the 19th century,
because a philosopher who doesn't know how to confront the most powerful movement
of his time is anything but a philosopher. But the real problem was that this
gap left open the possibility to whitewash Nietzsche's philosophy of monopoly
capitalism and to aestheticize away the fact that he combatted proletarian class
struggle from the same elevated circles of thought as did the next best stockbroker
or the next best reptile.